The following patents provide useful background information and are incorporated herein by reference: U.S. Pat. No. 6,426,750; U.S. Pat. No. 6,208,997; U.S. Pat. No. 5,929,860; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,831,625.
Other useful background information includes the following articles: “Fast Terrain Rendering Using Geometrical MipMapping” by de Boer, W. H. (2000); “Compression of Digital Elevation Maps Using Nonlinear Wavelets” by Creusere, C. D. (2000); “Efficient Triangular Surface Approximations Using Wavelets and Quadtree Data Structures” by Gross, M. H., Staadt, O. G., and Gatti, R. (1996); “Adaptive Surface Meshing and Multi-Resolution Terrain Depiction for SVS” by Wiesemann, T., Schiefele, J., Kubbat, W., Proceedings SPIE Vol. 4363 Enhanced and Synthetic Vision (August 2001); “Multi-Resolution Terrain Depiction and Airport Navigation Function on an Embedded SVS” by Wiesemann, T., Schiefele, J., Bader, J., Proceedings SPIE Vol. 4713 Enhanced and Synthetic Vision (July 2002); “Wavelet Analysis for a New Multiresolution Model for Large-Scale Textured Terrains” by Abasolo, M. J., Perales, F. J., Journal of WSCG, (2003); “Multiresolution Surface and Volume Representations” by Staadt, O. G., Geometric modeling for Scientific Visualization, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, (2003); “Generation of Hierarchical Multiresolution terrain Databases Using Wavelet Filtering” by McArthur, D. E., Fuentes, R. W., Devarajan, V., Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing (2000); “Compression Methods for Visualization” by Gross, M. H., Lippert, L., Staadt, O. G., Future Generation Computer Systems, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1999); “Multiresolution Compression and Reconstruction”, by Staadt, O. G., Gross, M. H., Weber, R., Proceedings of IEEE Visualization '97 (1997); “Fast Multiresolution Surface Meshing” by Gross, M. H., Gatti, R., Staadt, O. G., 6th IEEE Visualization Conference (1995).